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Pièces de clavecin, Book 1

Recordings

'Angela Hewitt works her magic on the most instrument-specific of the French grand siècle harpsichordists, not least by respecting rather than ...'First, the bad news. This third splendid selection of Couperin's keyboard music from Angela Hewitt is reported to be the last in the series. The good ...» More

Details

Les Idées heureuses (‘Happy Thoughts’) is the piece that Couperin is holding in one of the few portraits we have of him – the one by André Boüys – so it must have been a piece he particularly liked. It is certainly not happy-sounding, but rather pervaded by a melancholy that seems so deeply rooted in his music. Perhaps his happiness lay in solitary hours while others revelled in society. Wilfrid Mellers writes:

Couperin is the black-robed figure who, in some paintings of Watteau, beside the merry throng discoursing and flirting with such gracious urbanity, stands quietly in his corner, seeming to suggest not that the junketings are meaningless, the gestures empty, the urbanity a sham, but that, though the company may be delightful, one may be lonely, still.

La Favorite (‘The Favoured One’) is from the Troisième Ordre, and is subtitled Chaconne a deux tems. Rousseau states in his dictionary of 1768 that chaconnes used to be in either two or three beats to a bar, but that those in duple time were now extinct. The ‘favoured one’ is a reference to Madame de Maintenon, who had married the King without anyone knowing it. Austerity was the order of the day, as France was then involved in the War of the Spanish Succession. It is a great piece, one of Couperin’s finest, marked gravement, sans lenteur (solemnly, without dragging). The refrain of the chaconne is interspersed with five couplets, and the noble, rather gloomy character remains throughout.

The Quatrième Ordre seems to have a lot to do with the pleasures of Bacchus (especially its second piece, entitled Les Baccanales), and it ends with Le Réveil-matin (‘The Alarm Clock’). Obviously it was just as important then as now to get up in the morning, even with a hangover. Although the harpsichord would certainly be much more ‘noisy’ in the broken-octave passages, the piano can do the trick as well. The hardest thing here is to play all the trills in the tempo that the music demands.